Food allergy scare

I have a friend at work who has severe eczema and food allergies and some of the people there just don't get it either. One of my close girl friends has a little boy who has a life threatening peanut allergy.

Food allergies are real and life threatening. Not the result of picking eaters......all ingredients MUST be disclosed as well as other items made on the machinery. Trader Joe's includes the latter, more other companies are starting to do it but there needs to be more done.

Take care of you O!

 

Tiny round black seeds are poppy seeds. Sesame are larger and flattened. But apparently there is black sesame. I've never seen it but Wikipedia mentions it. Wikipedia also says that 5 to 13 people out of 100,000 are allergic to sesame.

A labor-intensive solution is to bake your own bread. It's really not difficult. Just time consuming. Or you could buy a bread machine. I've never used one so I don't know how they compare to the manual method. I'm conceited enough to assert that I can make better bread than any machine. But I'd bet any experienced bread baker could do the same. My particular trick is having my own flour mill capable of producing a very finely-milled flour from whole grains as well as from beans or even corn. Only wheat has the gluten for a superior elastic dough, but the others, especially beans, add distinctive flavors. Black-eyed pea flour adds a very pleasant and distinctive flavor. But it's strong and has no gluten, so just a little is best.

Sesame seeds are popular but really have no flavor. Poppy seeds have some flavor, and caraway seeds, traditional in rye bred, have a strong flavor and are good in any bread, with or without rye.

Unless you have a wheat allergy, begin your bread making with mostly wheat flour, and only small amounts of other flours for flavor. The very best is hard red spring wheat, for its high protein content and strong gluten. The best spring wheat comes from North Dakota. I used to buy 50-pound bags of it right from the grain elevator.

The very easiest bread to bake is unleavened pizza dough: Hard red spring wheat, finely milled, salt, and water. Mix it, knead it, roll it out thin, and cover it with your favorite toppings. Then toss out the mozzarella and use sharp aged cheddar instead.

For leavened breads you need to learn the niceties of yeast, which are very particular but not hard to master. With experience you can move on to breads with less or no wheat if that's your inclination. The new-age crown seems to have a dislike of wheat, but wheat has the most protein of any grain, and to my tongue, has the best flavor and texture. So I always baked wheat breads, with never more than about 10% other flours for variety.

I quit baking bread because I could not restrain myself from eating altogether too much of it. But when I was poor, back in rural North Dakota, I baked all my own bread.

 

I'm not sure which health authorities to report this to, but do preserve the evidence. There have been many food recalls caused by unlisted ingredients. Perhaps it is time for yet another.

 

I'm glad to hear you're alright.

I'm not deathly allergic to anything, though I have been hospitalised several times for digestive issues, so I can appreciate your scare. I'm far more careful now, and try not to eat bread at all. No way am I trusting my life to a list of ingredients that says "may contain...." Restaurant selections are pretty limited, but fortunately, like you, I'm a good cook. That's the only way I can be sure of the ingredients.

 

But no gluten. I like quinoa cooked, like rice. But I still prefer wheat as the bulk ingredient for bread.

 

You haven't used the right machine, or if you did, you didn't use it properly. At the very least, you can use a good machine to simplify the mixing, kneading, and first raise. The King Arthur Flour test kitchens use a bunch of Zojirushi machines. King Arthur's test kitchen staff claims they have never found anything that kneads as well as the Zorjirushi, including the ever popular Kitchen Aid mixer and your Mark 1 human hands.

I use my Kitchen Aid, my hands, and two bread makers - I bake a *lot* of bread. For our normal, eat it every day bread, I make it and bake it in a Zorjirushi BBCC-X20.

Tom

 

My wife is allergic to peanuts and I have learned from her profound and sometimes anaphylactic reactions that peanuts, peanut oil, or trace levels of peanut fragments and dust are hidden ingredients in more products than you would expect. Sadly, this means that she does not enjoy eating at restaurants. The bright side of this serious and under appreciated problem is that we probably saved enough money, over the past ten years of not eating out, to buy our 2010 Prius.

 

I have a Zorjirushi rice cooker... this is a brand I'd look at for anything else, as the rice cooker is amazing!

 

I can see a bread machine doing a single-stage sort of bread: put in the ingredients, knead, let it rise, bake. Any bread that's fresh will be better than any store-bought bread. But I used to let the yeast activate for a while, then make a sponge and let it rise and fall overnight, then put in the rest of the four and knead, let rise, then punch down, knead again, and then rise and bake. Oh, and rising always done in a warm oven over a pan of boiling water, for warmth and humidity. I got a nice light loaf using 100% whole grains. Simpler methods generally either give you a dense, heavy loaf or require the use of some white flour.

Again, any fresh bread will be better than any store-bought, so machine-made bread will be good. And of course easier than hand-made. But I suspect that hand-made is always going to be better than machine bread if it's done right.

 

Even the cheapest bread machines go through multiple raise cycles. Generally they use three raises, with a punch down after each raising. Because the conditions are tightly controlled, good bread machines do a better job raising bread than does your average human home baker.

There are two differences between machine baked bread and oven baked bread:

1) Oven baked bread generally has a better shape, assuming the baker knows how to shape a loaf. The bread machine can't pick up the dough ball and stretch it into shape, so the load will often be a tad less uniform and have a bit more texture to the surface.

2) Bread machine loaves have a slot or slots in them from the kneading paddle or paddles. The Zorjirushi is nice in this respect, in that is uses two much lower paddles. Using two smaller paddles improves kneading while minimizing the intrusion into the loaf.

Of course a bread machine can only bake loaves the shape of its baking pan. Any specialty shapes require hand shaping and oven baking as usual. Even so, for one or two loaves I will let the bread machine make the dough, and then hand shape and oven bake. For larger batches I use a Kitchen Aid or Hobart mixer.

Tom

 

I've been reading reviews of the Zorjirushi bread machines on Amazon. Everyone loves them. Then I noticed a post in the forum section of the smaller Zorjirushi machine: 100% whole wheat bread won't rise properly. Of course, they're probably using store-bought (coarse) w/w flour, and I use home-milled fine w/w, but still, this is a concern. So for now anyway, I won't by buying a bread machine.

I eat too much bread when it's home-baked anyway.

 

I've had an allergic reaction to shellfish - four days of the worst experience I could imagine.

I don't touch shellfish. I understand food allergies, believe me! If we do a potluck, I'll remember to get a list, okay?

 

My stock day-to-day bread is 100% whole wheat bread flour to which I add 85 grams of bulgur cracked wheat and 30 grams of bran. This bread has so much fiber that I call it "mulch bread", with the obvious reference to landscaping mulch. It rises beautifully in my Zorjirushi machine. I've also have used a Breadman machine with good results, but they aren't as rugged as the Zorjirushi.

With my mulch bread, I can use the whole wheat cycle and get a fluffy, lighter consistency, but to be honest, I like my whole wheat bread to have more texture and be fairly dense but moist. Because of that, I make mine with the standard bread cycle.

Daniel, if you do end up getting a machine, let me know if you want any pointers. When you are working by hand, you can adjust the process to fit the ingredients. With a bread machine, you have to adjust the recipe to work with the machine. It's not hard, but it can be frustrating if you have no experience.

As for store bought whole wheat flour, some stores have King Aurthur whole wheat bread flour. It is quite good for a major brand.

Tom

 

I have family members so allergic to seafood they can't even go swimming without having a reaction.

Potluck around here is usually done by putting everything on separate plates and letting people pick and choose. As soon as things get mixed together, even as a salad, that can be a problem. There are too many lists to possibly keep track. I admit to being one of the 'fussy' ones, but it's not really by choice.

 

We mix it all together and let nature weed out the weak.



Tom

 

Yeah, my birth family tried that on me until I smartened up.